FROM THE CHIEF HISTORIAN BORIS CHERTOK'S Rockets and ...

volume 26, number 2 second quarter 2009
space exploration, from the halcyon days of the launch of Yuriy Gagarin into orbit
in 1961 to the frst piloted Soyuz mission in 1967.
Chertok devotes a signifcant portion of the volume to the early years of Soviet
human spacefight. These include a chapter on the Vostok and Voskhod programs,
which left an indelible mark on early years of the “space race”; a lengthy meditation
on the origins and early missions of the Soyuz program; and a gripping account of
one of the most tragic episodes of the Soviet space program, the fight and death
of cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov during the very frst piloted Soyuz fight in 1967.
Additional chapters cover robotic programs such as the Molniya communications
satellite system, the Zenit spy satellite program, and the Luna series of probes
that culminated in the world’s frst survivable landing of a probe on the surface
of the Moon. Chertok also devotes several chapters to the development of early
generations of Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) and missile defense
systems; his narrative here skillfully combines technical, political, personal, and
strategic concerns, highlighting how these considerations were often diffcult to
separate into neat categories. In particular, we learn about the Soviet drive to
develop a workable solid propellant ICBM and the subsequent arguments over the
development of second generation ICBMs in the late 1960s, a fght so acrimonious
that contemporaries called it “the little civil war.”
Chertok’s chapter on the Cuban Missile Crisis provides a radically unique perspective
on the crisis, from the point of view of those who would have been responsible
for unleashing nuclear Armageddon in 1962 had Kennedy and Khrushchev not
been able to agree on a stalemate. Two further chapters cover the untimely deaths
of the most important luminaries of the era: Sergey Korolev and Yuriy Gagarin.
Each of these chapters is a tour de force, as Chertok uses a vast array of published
accounts to enrich his own personal recollections of the episodes. Finally, historians
of Soviet science will fnd much of interest in the concluding chapter, which focuses
on the relationship between the space program and the Soviet Academy of Sciences.
This chapter represents one of the most insightful descriptions of the formation of a
Soviet “aerospace” elite during the post-World War II era.
In the period covered by Chertok, from 1961 to 1967, the Soviet Union achieved an
unprecedented series of frsts, the era that Russians still typically associate with a “golden
age” of Soviet space exploration. Much as the Apollo missions indelibly convey a nostalgic
sense of the possibilities of American space exploration, the visages of young
“hero” cosmonauts from the early 1960s at Red Square parades continue to exemplify
the immense political and cultural cachet of space exploration during the Cold War. The
central fgure in Chertok’s tale is Sergey Pavlovich Korolev, the “Chief Designer” of the
leading missile and spacecraft design organization, who many consider the most important
architect of the Soviet push for space and who is still eulogized in saintly terms in the
post-Soviet landscape. Westerners who have written about the history of the Soviet space
program typically fxate on Korolev to the exclusion of other actors. There are compelling
reasons to do so: Korolev was an extraordinarily charismatic fgure whose biography
encompassed equal parts tragedy and redemption. His biographer Yaroslav Golovanov
astutely noted that “Korolev was a most exact refection of an epoch . . . . He knew all
its triumphs and drained the cup of its bitterness to the dregs. Korolev’s biography is
the concretization of the history of our land in one man . . . .” 2 Chertok’s description of
2. Yaroslav Golovanov, Sergei Korolev: The Apprenticeship of a Space Pioneer (Moscow: Mir Publishers,
1975), p. 293.
continued on page 57
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